Chapter 178: The losing game
MARGAUX
He crumpled before I could even move, his knees folding in a way that was all wrong, like his body had given up before his mind caught on. I was already reaching for him, heart hammering against my ribs, but all I managed was to break his fall at the very end, landing hard on my knees beside him. The slap of his body against the floor echoed down the corridor—a sound I would remember, sharp and final.
"Étienne." My hands went to his face, cold skin beneath my palms. I turned his head gently, searching for any sign of him in the slackness of his features. "Étienne." My voice sounded too loud, almost desperate in the hush.
There was no answer. His eyelids fluttered, then stilled. I shook him, not gently this time. The sort of shake that’s half panic, half command: wake up, come back, don’t you dare slip away now.
Still I got nothing back in response. Silence pressed in around us, thick and unyielding.
I forced myself to look down at his side. The wound was worse than I’d feared—a deep, ugly gash that refused to close, blood pulsing out in steady, bright red waves. It soaked into his shirt, blooming outward in a pattern that should have slowed, should have stopped by now if his healing factor was any good. But the blood kept coming.
The skin around the wound now had a strange, mottled look. Not just bruised—almost bruised and burned at the same time, the edges red, angry and wrong. I didn’t have the words for what I was seeing, only the icy certainty that this wasn’t normal. It wasn’t healing after all, and this did not look like anything I knew how to fix. My stomach twisted, cold and useless, as if my own body was echoing the panic in my hands.
I glanced up and down the corridor, hoping for help, for someone to appear. But all I had was Étienne, silent and still, and blood that would not stop.
The wound’s edges had taken on a strange, sickly color, a hue that didn’t belong on living skin. There was a swelling heat radiating from the spot, and the skin seemed to have both bruised and burned at once, with angry red spreading outwards, deepening into an almost purple-black where the flesh met the gash. I stared at it, willing myself to remember something useful from the little healer lessons I had attended at Beaumont, but all I could summon up was a sense of wrongness that squeezed my throat. The best word I could find was infected, but even that felt like it missed some crucial mark; this was something more, something unnatural, as if the wound had decided to revolt against the very idea of healing.
My voice came out unsteady as I looked up. "Laurent, what is happening to him? Why isn’t he... why isn’t he healing?"
Laurent did not answer me with words. He was already in motion, reaching beneath his coat for a folded cloth, his hands moving with the kind of practiced economy that spoke of fieldwork and crisis, not theory. He pressed the cloth to Étienne’s side, both hands braced and knuckles white as he leaned in, putting all his weight behind the pressure. Blood welled up anyway, seeping through the cloth and slicking Laurent’s fingers.
"We need the healer," he said, voice clipped and urgent, sweat beading at his temple. "Now."
We both looked at the same time toward the far end of the corridor, where the head healer lay crumpled against the wall. Prim’s apparition attack had left him slumped and unmoving, his arm twisted under him at an awkward angle.
"Fuck." The curse word slipped out of my mouth, raw and desperate, and was echoed by Laurent, the two of us united for a heartbeat in helpless profanity.
Laurent was already repositioning himself, shifting his grip on Étienne, eyes darting back to the bleeding wound. "There isn’t time to wait. The apprentices in the infirmary will have to do. They have seen enough to keep him alive until the head healer wakes." His voice left no room for argument.
I slid my arms beneath Étienne’s shoulders, bracing myself for the awful, slack weight of him. Lifting an unconscious person is nothing like lifting someone who can help you, and my muscles burned as we pulled him upright between us. Blood smeared my palms and dripped to the floor, leaving a trail as we hurried through the corridor, Laurent barking reminders to keep pressure on the wound, the hall stretching ahead of us as if it would never end.
We passed by the healer and my heart hurt seeing the state that he was in.
"What about him?" I looked back at the healer still unconscious against the wall, my voice coming out unsteady. "What if he is not fine?"
"Go check him," Laurent said, already repositioning under Étienne’s weight. "But in the grand scheme of things right now, Étienne’s life is the more pressing matter. I will ensure he makes it to the infirmary before this gets any worse."
I nodded and let go.
He ran.
I heard his voice echoing back through the corridor, calling for the apprentices, and, somewhere farther into the estate, another voice rose in the distance, panicked and male, carrying the specific pitch of someone who had just been told something terrible. It sounded like Alpha Dorian, though I could not be certain, and I filed it away and turned back to the head healer.
I crouched beside him and checked his pulse first, then his breathing, then tilted his head gently to look at his pupils.
Knocked out cold.
But his vitals were steady, and his color was not wrong, and the way his eyes were moving behind their lids told me he was going to come back on his own within minutes rather than requiring anything more urgent from me.
He was fine.
Not immediately useful, but fine.
I looked at Prim’s apparition.
"What did you do to him?" My voice came out flat.
"The healer? I did not..."
"Étienne. I am talking about Étienne. What did you put in that wound? Some fucked up ghost ability?"
She looked at me with the complicated expression that had replaced the manic fury after my light had touched her.
"I wanted him dead at the time," she said. "But it was only an attack. There was nothing in it that should have caused this."
"Then why is he not healing?"
She was quiet for a moment.
"I do not know. But before he went unconscious, I did sense something," she said. "In him." Another pause followed before she continued. "It felt so deeply wrong. It felt like death."
"He is not going to die." The words came out before I had examined them. "I refuse to lose him again."